Artists in residence

VISUAL ARTS

MULTIMEDIA

Saadia Mirza is based between Chicago and Islamabad. Her interests and research range from landscape studies to the history of cartography, science and technology. Her current and past research projects focus on methods using filmmaking, animation, virtual reality and cartography. An architect by training, she has taught design and architecture in Islamabad, Pakistan.

She works in collaboration with scientists and researchers, using new media to “unlock” data sets that tell stories about war, conflict and climate change. She likes to pay attention to sensory impressions of data, sound, image and texture – experienced in immersion with a narrative that shows how knowledge is created in a world of incomplete information.

She has worked in Germany, Switzerland and France as a researcher and resident artist. Her most recent project, conducted in conversation with archaeologists, focuses on visualizing conflict and militarization in Kandahar, Afghanistan. She is currently in conversation with glaciologists and is working on a project on the sounds of Antarctic ice.

As a pianist, Gunel Mirzayeva have been performing a wide range of Bach’s keyboard repertoire and Azerbaijani piano music for a long period of time and have been motivated by passion in exploring new avenues of interpretation.

The balance between fusion of contrasting musical traditions, musical methods of ornamentation and embellishment practices are at the centre of her current practice-based doctoral research at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. The development of Gunel Mirzayeva’s music consciousness was mirrored in the continuous experimentation with the text, the tendency is widely represented with jazz or folk music but was not passed onto classical musicians to such an extent.

During Gunel Mirzayeva’s residency at the Cité internationale des arts, her intention is to explore the fundamental aesthetics of improvisation and re-composition of J.S. Bach’s keyboard works with Azerbaijani national music genre mugham and investigate the fundamental aesthetics of improvisation in her interpretation of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, formulating western embellishment methods in the composition.

The proposed project aims to reveal a historical and cultural relationship between mugham and the Baroque musical style of improvisation. Gunel Mirzayeva plans to apply the resulting interpretational findings to her performance practice.

VISUAL ARTS
DRAWING

Marianne Mispelaëre is a French artist, whose practice focuses on drawing. She likes to observe and produce concise, simple and precise gestures, inspired by current and societal phenomena and events. Her research process focuses on the means of occurrence, its stakes and its consequences.